Power 7 CPU - 8 cores

[AJCopland]

Oh, huh, I was going to kvetch that IBM PPCs don't support AltiVec, outside the G5, and therefore it'd be annoying for running software that supported it, but I looked and they've actually incorporated it into POWER6 on up. Whaddya know.

Altivec's also supported in the Xbox360 and PS3 cpu's they're a bit cheaper, but not really your typical desktop CPU design.

I think IBM gave up the desktop when they realised how small the profit margins were going to be. Better to make CPUs for high-end servers, mainframes, routers/switches/networking and automotive usage all of which have much larger profit margins.

[AJCopland]

Aside from the rambling about what the future of CPU design is the actual discussion about PPC & x86/64 is quite interesting.

I'm not sure what CPU ISA the PS4 or Xbox Next are going to use because I've not been working on them this time (last 10 months). The rumours around them are going all over the place so until there's something official announced or I get to work on one I'm not willing to bet. It's been everything from 16-core PPC to 4-core 8-thread x86/64 and AMD/Ati to nVidia GPUs so who knows what will actually be in the Xbox 720/Next/Durango.

You can get some stunning, genuinely stunning performance out of either ISA and games consoles have the advantage of not running a full multitasking OS etc. There's certainly mileage left in PPC and x86/64 for the consoles and the desktop.

[AJCopland]

Yeah, its strange.
We know what the Xbox720's GPU will be based on, but no one's certain about the CPU.
We have a really good idea of what the WiiU will be like.
And my guess is that the PS4 will follow a much more evolutionary path then previous Sony consoles (remaining Cell based).

Dunno, seen specs with PPC + Ati and seen Intel + nVidia so not sure what's really in the Xbox720.
However, fairly certain that the PS4 won't have Cell I head they were going with an AMD CPU!

As I said, I think we can safely say that none of us have a clue until they're released, there's just too many conflicting rumours.

[AJCopland]

Can you show me how to program utilizing all the cores? I have a Windows component bug with the file sharing (which is used) at work that crashes. Can you disassemble the component if I send it to you and fix it for me? While you are at it, can you fix our GHz computers from stopping and being unresponsive for several seconds? I suppose I can upgrade to the i7 and it will probably be fast until Windows 9 comes out (the fix for the Windows 8 every other generation mistake). We still use Windows XP so we shouldn't need an i7 CPU but Windows slows down the more and more we use it. Can you fix that too?

None of that is down to the CPU. You'd encounter the same issues running a super-68k CPU because it's software. When you don't have to deal with a modern OS and the thousands of processes it has to manage then you can get plenty of performance out of ANY of these architectures.

Bog it down then it will go slow.

Honestly everyone goes on about AmigaOS vs Windows 7/8 but frankly AOS does absolutely nothing in comparison to it. If, and it's obviously a hypothetical if, AmigaOS development had continued in parity with Windows and x86 over the years then we'd all be whining about the same things. It's not some wonder-CPU-architecture that made AOS usable, it was simply because it was extremely primitive compared to modern operating systems.

[AJCopland]

@matthey
Yes but that's my point. You can't compare AmigaOS from 1980's to Windows 7 from 201X hence my hypothetical example of IF AmigaOS had continued to be updated then it'd be in the same sluggish state.

I'm just saying that you're falling into the old-OS vs new-OS fanboy behaviour. You cannot compare the two, they're both OS's but from 30 years apart that do completely different jobs.

There are things to be said for the simplicity of AmigaOS but if you like that sort of thing then you should look at HaikuOS and see how to achieve it's minimal feature set still requires some serious CPU performance before you start running any programs on it.

I agree that you can definitely take the 68k design and get a lot more performance out of it. The 68060 design was already going down the path that x86 successfully followed. Superscalar design, multiple ALUs, Out-of-Order, branch prediction, op-fusion + cache, pre-fetching, etc these are all things that x86 & PPC (and other ISAs) have all successfully integrated and they're as applicable to 68k as to anything else. Although some are more applicable to hard designs than to FPGA based ones apparently.

I think you're on the right track if you take something like the TG68 fpga design and start to do things like improve it to make instructions run in a single cycle, add a 2nd ALU, improve the cache performance ad infinitum.

Andy